The Saint Between Two Camels

The distinctive iconography of St. Menas of Egypt: the young soldier-martyr standing frontally — most often as an orant, arms raised in prayer, in military dress, sometimes holding a cross or standard — flanked by two crouching camels that turn their heads inward toward him. This file establishes the formal grammar of the type, its origin in the founding-and-translation legend of the shrine, its appearance across the early-Christian media (the terracotta ampullae above all, but also ivories, textiles, and frescoes), the debated meaning of the camels, and the way an Orthodox reader receives the image against the dogmatic theology of the holy icon. The two-camel Menas is one of the most instantly recognizable images of early-Christian art, and one of the most widely circulated.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Coptic (Great Martyr; Wonderworker)

The Type Described

The Menas type is among the most fixed and legible in the whole repertory of early-Christian saints. At its center stands a young man, beardless or with only a short beard, in the costume of a Roman soldier — tunic, military cloak (chlamys or paludamentum), and frequently the short fringed kilt of the late-antique infantryman; he stands frontally, facing the viewer, his weight even, in the rigid axial pose that early-Christian and Byzantine art reserves for the holy person presented for veneration. His arms are most often raised and bent at the elbow in the gesture of the orans or orant — the ancient attitude of prayer, palms open and outward — though on a minority of examples he holds a cross-staff, a standard, or a martyr’s wreath, and on still others the arms are lowered (Kaufmann, Zur Ikonographie der Menas-Ampullen, 1910; Vikan, Early Byzantine Pilgrimage Art, 2010). To either side of him, at the level of his knees, kneels or crouches a camel, its forelegs folded under it in the posture a camel takes to be loaded or to rest; and — this is the diagnostic detail — each camel turns its long neck and head back and inward, toward the saint, so that the two beasts seem to bow or attend to the figure between them (Kaufmann 1910; Grossmann, “Menas, Saint,” in The Coptic Encyclopedia, 1991).

The composition is heraldic and symmetrical: a central upright human axis with two flanking animals turned toward it, a scheme with deep roots in the ancient Near Eastern “master of animals” formula but here wholly Christianized into a portrait of a praying martyr attended by the beasts of his own legend. The symmetry made the image ideal for reproduction in a roundel or a stamped medallion, which is precisely how it was most often used (Vikan 2010). Where a halo or a cross appears above the head, and where the saint’s name is inscribed — typically the Greek ho hagios Mēnas, “Saint Menas,” or the eulogia tou hagiou Mēna, “the blessing of Saint Menas” — the identification is explicit and secure (Kaufmann 1910; Grossmann 1991). The type is so distinctive that a fragment showing only the lower portion — a pair of crouching camels flanking a pair of standing feet — suffices to identify a Menas object in an excavation, which is one reason the flasks can be mapped so confidently across the Mediterranean (see The Menas Flasks).

The Origin of the Image: The Translation by Camel

The camels are not a decorative or generic motif but a narrative one: they belong to the founding legend of the shrine, and the image is in effect a compressed icon of that legend. The tradition — surviving in the Greek and Coptic Passio and the encomiastic literature, and pinned here to those texts per METHODOLOGY.md §3.5 rather than asserted as fact — relates that after the martyr’s death his body was carried for burial, or later translated, by camel across the desert of the Mareotis; that at a certain place the camel bearing the relics lay down and would not rise or go further; that this refusal was taken as the saint’s own choice of his resting-place; and that the church and then the great pilgrimage-city of Abu Mena were raised over the spot so indicated (the legend itself, in its variants, is owned by The Camel and the Founding Legend; James Drescher, Apa Mena, 1946). The two-camel image freezes this story into a sign: the saint stands at the place the camels brought him and would go no further, and the beasts turn to him as the legend has them halt before him.

This narrative origin is the majority scholarly account of the motif, and it is the reading the cult itself plainly understood, since the image and the legend were transmitted together at the shrine that the legend founded (Kaufmann, Die Menasstadt, 1910; Grossmann 1991). It is not, however, the only reading scholars have proposed, and honesty requires that the alternatives be named. [Disputed: the precise origin and meaning of the two-camel motif is read three ways in the literature. (A) The dominant reading derives the camels directly from the founding-and-translation legend — the relics borne by the camel that lay down and would go no further, the saint shown at the spot it indicated (Kaufmann, *Die Menasstadt*, 1910; Grossmann, *Coptic Encyclopedia*, 1991). (B) A second reading treats the camels primarily as a symbol of the desert and of the Mareotis itself — the saint as the holy protector of the desert pilgrimage-route, the camel being the emblematic beast of that landscape (so the iconography is read in pilgrimage-art studies, e.g. Vikan, *Early Byzantine Pilgrimage Art*, 2010). (C) A third notes the camel as the beast of the Mareotis caravan and wine trade and reads the motif as evoking the commercial and pilgrim traffic that the shrine sat astride (discussed in the pilgrimage-economy literature, e.g. Frankfurter, ed., *Pilgrimage and Holy Space in Late Antique Egypt*, 1998). These readings are not mutually exclusive — the legend may itself encode the desert and the caravan — and the scholarship presents the question as discussed and not finally settled.] What is not in doubt is that by the fifth century the image was already standardized and understood at the shrine as the proper portrait of its saint.

On the Ampullae

The overwhelming majority of surviving examples of the two-camel Menas are the stamped images on the terracotta pilgrim ampullae — the Menasampullen, “Menas flasks” — mould-made at Abu Mena from roughly the fifth through the seventh century and filled with holy water from the shrine’s spring or with sanctified oil, to be carried home by the pilgrim as eulogia, the “blessing” of the saint (the flasks themselves, their manufacture, typology, and distribution, are owned by The Menas Flasks; Kaufmann, Zur Ikonographie der Menas-Ampullen, 1910). For the purposes of iconography the flasks matter because they are the principal carrier of the type and the reason for its astonishing diffusion: the image was reproduced in its thousands, in cheap stamped clay, and carried by pilgrims from the Mareotis to the Levant, North Africa, Italy, Constantinople, the Rhineland (Cologne), Gaul, and Britain (Kaufmann 1910; Vikan 2010). No other early-Christian saint’s portrait was multiplied and dispersed on anything like this scale. The flask-image is therefore not a minor or derivative witness but the very thing that made the two-camel Menas one of the most widely circulated devotional images of the entire pre-Iconoclast Mediterranean — a mass-produced sacred portrait, the closest the early Church came to a universally recognizable icon distributed by hand.

The flask-stamps fix the canonical form: the frontal orant soldier, the two crouching camels with heads turned, the encircling inscription naming the saint. Because the moulds were cut and recut over two centuries, the type admits minor variation — the depth of the relief, the presence or absence of a cross above, the treatment of the dress — and this variation has been used by Kaufmann and his successors to build a relative chronology of the flasks (Kaufmann, Zur Ikonographie, 1910; Grossmann, Abû Mînâ I, 1989). But the core of the image is remarkably stable across the whole production, which is itself evidence that the type was understood as the saint’s fixed and proper portrait, not a free composition.

On Ivories, Textiles, and Frescoes

Though the flasks are the great carriers of the image, the two-camel Menas appears across the full range of early-Christian and Coptic media, which shows that it functioned as a true icon-type and not merely as a souvenir-stamp. Carved ivories preserve some of the finest versions: a small number of Menas pyxides and related plaques — among them the type associated with the British Museum and the Milan collections — show the saint as the orant soldier between his camels in fully worked relief, the same composition translated from cheap clay into a luxury material (Kaufmann 1910; on the early-Byzantine ivory pyxides generally, Vikan 2010). [Disputed: the attribution, exact provenance, and dating of individual Menas ivories — the so-called British Museum and Milan Menas pyxides and related carvings — are debated in the specialist ivory literature, and not every "Menas" attribution is secure; the iconographic identification rests on the diagnostic two-camel composition rather than on a fixed corpus, and the present file follows the general iconographic studies (Kaufmann 1910; Vikan 2010) without asserting a settled catalogue.]

The image also appears woven or appliquéd on Coptic textiles, painted in frescoes and on panel, and worked in other portable media, both in Egypt and beyond (Kaufmann, Die Menasstadt, 1910; Grossmann, Coptic Encyclopedia, 1991). The consistency of the type across these media — the same frontal orant, the same flanking beasts — is the strongest single argument that the two-camel composition was received as the icon of Menas, the canonical visual form by which he was known and venerated, and not as one artist’s invention. An image that recurs unchanged on clay, ivory, cloth, and plaster, from Egypt to the Rhineland, is by definition a type, and a type is the visual vocabulary of veneration.

The Meaning of the Image

If the camels’ narrative origin is the translation legend, their meaning within the image is richer than mere illustration. Most directly, the beasts are witnesses: they attend the saint, turning their heads to him as the legend has them halt before him, and so they function within the picture much as the lion or the eagle functions in other early-Christian portraits — as the creaturely witness to the holiness of the person at the center. The camel that “would go no further” is, in the logic of the legend, the first witness to the place God chose for His martyr, and the icon makes the beasts permanent witnesses to the saint they brought home (Grossmann 1991). Read against the alternatives named above, the same beasts also stand for the desert in which Menas is the holy protector, and for the caravan road on which his shrine sat — so that the image gathers into one heraldic sign the martyr, his resting-place, his desert, and the pilgrim traffic that came to him (Vikan 2010; Frankfurter 1998).

The orant gesture carries its own meaning and is the heart of the image’s devotional force. The saint stands with arms raised in prayer — not in the act of fighting or ruling, as the warrior-saints George and Demetrios are often shown, but in the act of intercession. The pilgrim who carried the flask carried a portrait of his saint praying, and the implied object of that prayer was the pilgrim’s own need: the orant Menas is the intercessor caught in the act of intercession, the visual form of exactly what the pilgrim had come to ask (Vikan 2010; on the orant on the flasks, see The Menas Flasks). The image is thus not only a label identifying whose blessing the flask carried; it is a small icon of intercession pressed into the very vessel of the blessing.

The Image and the Theology of the Icon

For an Orthodox reader the two-camel Menas is not merely an interesting artifact but a holy image, and it is properly received against the Church’s dogmatic theology of the icon. The decisive principle, articulated by St John of Damascus in the eighth-century crisis and defined by the Seventh Ecumenical Council (Nicaea II, 787), is that the honour paid to the image passes to its prototype, and that the one who venerates the icon venerates the person depicted in it — the veneration (proskynēsis) due to images being sharply distinguished from the worship (latreia) due to God alone (the full dogmatic treatment is in Icons and Iconoclasm; cf. St John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images). On this understanding the stamped saint on a clay flask is not an idol and not a mere decoration: it is an image through which the venerator is directed to the holy person of Menas himself, and through him to God who is wonderful in His saints.

There is a striking historical point here. The Menas flasks were produced in their thousands in the centuries before the Iconoclast controversy, and they are among the plainest material evidence that the veneration of holy images — and specifically of the images of the saints, carried, kissed, and applied to the sick — was a settled, mass practice of the pre-Iconoclast Church, not an innovation of the eighth century or a corruption resisted by the “pure” early Church (Vikan 2010; on the pre-Iconoclast image-cult, Icons and Iconoclasm; on the period, The Pre-Schism Church). The pilgrim who carried a Menas flask from Abu Mena to Cologne was carrying, and venerating, an icon of a saint — and he was doing so two centuries before anyone thought to forbid it. The humble two-camel stamp is thus, read theologically, a witness to the antiquity and the popular depth of the very practice the Seventh Council would later vindicate.

One of the Most Recognizable Images in Early-Christian Art

The cumulative result of all this — the fixed type, the mass reproduction, the diffusion across three continents, the recurrence across media — is that the two-camel Menas became, and remains, one of the most instantly recognizable images of early-Christian art. It belongs in the same rank of fixed saintly types as George with his dragon and Demetrios on his horse, and in surviving form it is older than either; but unlike those it owes its fame less to monumental art than to the humblest of objects, the stamped clay flask carried in a pilgrim’s bag (Vikan 2010; Kaufmann 1910). For the modern museum-goer the frontal soldier between two kneeling camels is the sign of Menas, legible at a glance from London to the Levant; for the late-antique pilgrim it was the sign that the blessing in his flask was the blessing of this saint, the wonderworker of the Mareotis. The image is, in the end, the most economical possible statement of the whole cult: a praying martyr, the desert that holds him, and the road that leads to him.

References

Kaufmann, Carl Maria. Die Menasstadt und das Nationalheiligtum der altchristlichen Aegypter. Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1910. (The foundational excavation report on Abu Mena, with extensive treatment of the iconography and the legend.)
Kaufmann, Carl Maria. Zur Ikonographie der Menas-Ampullen. Cairo: Finck, 1910. (The foundational typological and iconographic study of the two-camel image on the flasks and its variants.)
Grossmann, Peter. Abû Mînâ I: Die Gruftkirche und die Gruft. Mainz: von Zabern, 1989; and “Menas, Saint” / “Abu Mina,” in The Coptic Encyclopedia, ed. Aziz S. Atiya. New York: Macmillan, 1991. (The modern archaeology and the Coptic-iconographic entries.)
Vikan, Gary. Early Byzantine Pilgrimage Art. Rev. ed. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2010. (The standard study of pilgrim eulogiae and their iconography, including the orant Menas and the flask-stamps.)
Frankfurter, David, ed. Pilgrimage and Holy Space in Late Antique Egypt. Leiden: Brill, 1998. (The pilgrimage context, the desert and caravan setting, and the diffusion of the ampullae.)
Drescher, James. Apa Mena: A Selection of Coptic Texts Relating to St. Menas. Cairo: Société d’archéologie copte, 1946. (The Coptic Passio and Miracles, including the founding-and-translation legend behind the image.)
St. John of Damascus. Three Treatises on the Divine Images. Trans. Andrew Louth. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003. (The patristic defence of the holy image; honour passing to the prototype.)